


Be Here To Love Me

by semperama



Series: Tumblr Ficlets - Pinto [21]
Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: Birthday, Birthday Presents, Goodbyes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-02 09:18:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11506365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperama/pseuds/semperama
Summary: Zach shows up with a birthday gift and a promise.





	Be Here To Love Me

For his 35th, he went to a gay bar and partied the night away. For his 36th, he gets take-out tacos, eats them at home alone, and takes an irresponsible, three-hour afternoon nap.

And gets woken up at 5 p.m. by an insistent knocking on the door.

It’s probably Katie. Maybe his mother. They tried to get him to agree to a family get-together, but he feels like he’s too old for that. Eating cake in his parents’ kitchen makes him feel like he’s eight years old again, and not in a good way. He’s entered the backside of his thirties, damnit. He can say he’s almost 40, and it won’t necessarily be untrue. It seems like a good time for afternoon naps and tacos, not a good time for celebrating.

He pulls open the door and stares into Zach’s face.

“What—”

_What are you doing here? What the fuck is happening?_

“I wanted to see you one more time before I go back to New York,” Zach says, answering the questions Chris couldn’t quite get out. He looks…soft, in more than one way. His beard has gotten a little longer, and Chris thinks if he rubbed his face against it, it’d feel fuzzy rather than scratchy. And then there are his eyes, which are liquid gold in the light of the setting sun and full of sheepishness and affection and uncertainty and desire. Chris sucks in a sharp breath.

“Dude,” he says helplessly. “I don’t—”

But before Chris can completely fail to finish another sentence, Zach draws a hand out from behind his back, producing a little parcel wrapped haphazardly in glossy paper—pages ripped from a magazine, it looks like. Photos of beaches and smiling people. Something you’d find in a hotel room, singing the praises of the local sights.

Chris stretches out a hand and takes the gift, feeling the weight of it, the shape. It’s irregular but hefty, and he would never guess what it is, but he stands there for too many seconds turning it over in his hands anyway, feeling like he should just know without having to open it. It’s something important enough for Zach to show up unannounced when he has a plane to catch.

“Open it,” Zach says softly.

So he does, sliding his thumbnail under pieces of tape and peeling it up carefully, trying to save the pages on instinct. He could do something with them later maybe. He could cut out the waves, the bronzed people with their too-white smiles, and paste them in his journal under today’s date, under the inevitable ”Today Zach showed up on my doorstep on the way out of town and gave me a…”

A crystal butterfly. A beautiful crystal butterfly, whose wings hold rainbows when Chris lifts it up to the light.

“I saw it in a store,” Zach says. “In Australia. It made me think of you, but then I…”

Chris waits, blinking dumbly.

“But then I wasn’t sure I should give it to you,” Zach says in a rush. “I wasn’t sure, but…now I am. I…I just thought you might…”

In his haste to get his arms around Zach, Chris almost drops the damn thing. In the end, it stays clutched in his fist, his palm almost splitting around the near-sharp edges of the butterfly’s wings. But he doesn’t notice the sting, because he’s too busy holding onto Zach as tightly as he can, pressing against him from chest to thigh, his eyes squeezed shut so he can focus on nothing as much as they way they fit together and the way Zach is breathing too fast and too hot against his neck.

“Don’t go,” Chris whispers. Maybe he didn’t want to eat cake in his parents’ kitchen, but he doesn’t want to eat it alone in his own kitchen either. He wants to cuddle up with Zach on the couch and feed him cake to him with his fingers, kiss frosting off his mouth. He wants to stay up too late watching old movies and talking about when they were young, so young, and never thought they’d be where they are now.

“I have to,” Zach says. His voice is rough—he’s crying, and Chris doesn’t have to see him to know. “I have to go, but I’ll come back. Okay?”

“Okay,” Chris says, because if he says it that’ll make it true, right?

“Say you believe me.”

“I believe you.” He pours conviction into it, really meaning it this time. “I believe you.”

He can watch Zach leave one more time, if that’s all it is. If it’s just this once, and then he’ll be back for good. He can take the crystal butterfly into his room, he can place it on his dresser. He can look at it while he falls asleep and think, this isn’t to remember him by.


End file.
